Magick Without Tears Chapter 29. What Is Certainty?
Author: Aleister Crowley Publisher: St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications. Publish Date: 1954 Review Date: Status:💥
Annotations
209
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the L aw. The Chinese cannot help thinking that the Octave h as five not es. The more necessary anything appears to my mind, t he more certain it is that I only assert a limita tion. I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms o n awak ing. I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found h er a virgin in the morni ng. (The Book of Lies
209
I wouldn’t start to argue with the Chinese, if I were you; they might remind you that you exude the stench peculiar t o c orpse
209
Again, that other “Hymn to St. Thomas,” as I o ught perhaps to have called i t: Doubt. Doubt Thyself Doubt even if thou doubtest thyself. Doubt a ll Doubt even if thou doubtest a ll. It seems sometimes as if beneath all conscious d oubt there lay some deepest certainty. 0 kill it! slay t he s The horn of the Doubt-Goat be exalted! Dive d eeper, ever deeper, into the Abyss of Mind, until t hou unearth the fox T HAT. On, hounds! Yoicks! Tally-h o! Bring T HAT to bay! Then, wind the M or
252
You want to k
now what the Odds are when I say “certain.
” A case for casuistry? At least, for classification. It d
epends rather on one’s tone of voice? Yes, of course, and as to t
he classification, off we jog to the Divine Pymander, who s
aw, and stated, the quiddity of our query with his a
ccustomed lucidity. He discerns three degrees of Truth; and h
e distinguishes accordingly:
- T
rue 2. Certain without e
rror 3. Of all t
ruth. Clear enough, the difference between 1 and 2: ask me t
he time, I say half-past two; and that’s true enough. But t
he Astronomer Royal is by no manner of means satisfied w
ith any approximation of that kind. He wants it accurate. H
e must know the longitude to the second; he must have
decided what method of measuring time is to be used; h
253
2 11
253
must make corrections for this and for that ; and he m
ust have attached an (arbitrary) interpretation to the system; the
whole question of Relativity pops up. And, even so, he w
ill enter a caveat about every single ganglion in the gossamer o
f his c
alculations. Well then, all this intricate differentiation and i
ntegration and verification and Lord knows what leads at last to a
statement which may be called “Certain without E
rro
253
But Hennes Trismegistus is not content with any s
uch fugues as the Astronomer, however cunning and colossal h
is Ortan ; his Third Degree demands much more than this. T
he Astronomer’s estimate has puttied every tiniest crack, h
e concedes it, but then waves it brusquely away: all the t
ime the door is standing wide open!
253
The Astronomer’s exquisitely tailored figure stands i
n abashed isolation, like a gawky young man at his first Ball; he
feels·that he doesn’t belong. For this D.S.T., or Greenwich, o
r what not, however exact in itself, is so only in reference t
o some other set of measurements which themselves tum o
ut to be arbitrary; it is not of any ultimate import; nobody c
an dispute it, but it simply doesn’t matter to anybody, a
part from the particular case. It is not “Of all Tru
th.” What Hennes means by this it will be well to e
nquir
253
May we call it “a truth of Religion”? (Don’t be shocked!
The original word implies a binding-together-again, as in a
”Body of Doctrine”; compare the word Ligature. It was o
nly later, by corruption, that the word came to imply “piety”;
re-ligens, attentive [to the gods] as opposed to neg-lige
ns, neglectful.
253
I think that Hermes was contemplating a Ruach c
losely knitted together and anchored by incessant Aspiration to t
he Supernal Triad; just such an one, in short, as appears in t
hose remarks on the Magical Memory, a God-man ready to d
iscard his well-worn Instrument for a new one, brought up to d
ate with all the latest improvements (the movement of t
he Zeitgeist during his past incarnation, in particular) w
ell wrought and ready for his u
254
212
254
This being so, a truth which is “of all Truth” should m
ean any proposition which forms an essential part of t
his Khu-this ‘Magical Identity’ of a m
254
Now how curious it must appear at the first glance to n
ote that the truths of this order should prove to be what we c
all Axioms-or even P
latitudes. “The more certain I am of anything, the more certain it i
s that I am only asserting a limitation of my own m
in
254
Very good, but what am I to do about it? Some at least o
f such certainties must surely be “of all Truth.” The test of
admission to this class ought to be that, if one were to a
ccept the contradictory of the proposition, the entire structure o
f the Mind would be knocked to pieces, as is not at all the c
ase with the Astronomer’s determination, which may tum out t
o be wrong for a dozen different reasons without anybody
getting seriously wounded in his tenderest feelings.
254
The Statesman knows instinctively, or at worst, by his
training and experience, what sort of assertion, harmless
enough on the surface, may be “dangerous thinking,” a
death-blow to his own idea of what is “of all Truth,” a
nd strikes out wildly in a panic entirely justifiable from his o
wn point of view. Exhibit No. l: Galileo and that lot. W
hat could it possibly matter to the Gospel story that p
eople should think that the Earth moves round the Sun? (Ri
emann, and oh! such a lot of things, have shown that it didn’t a
nd doesn’t! This sort of “Truth” is only a set of c
onvention
254
”Oh, don’t gas away like this! I want to know what to d
o about it. Am I to accept this caterwauling Gamut, a
nd enlarge my Mind, and call it an Initiation? Or am I to nail m
y own of-all-Truth Tonic Solf a to the Mast, and go down into
the Maelstrom of Insanity with colours flying?”
Do you really need Massed Bands to lull Baby to s
lee
255
2
1
255
notes; that of the Party of the Second Part, h
ereinafter referred to as-not a Heretic, an Atheist, a Bolshie, a
Die-hard, a Schismatic, an Anarchist, a Black Magician, a
Friend of Aleister Crowley, or whatever may be the curren
t term of abuse-Mr. A, Lord B, the Duke of C, Mrs. X, o
r whatever he or she may chance to be called-into five. T
he Structure called of-all-Truth in neither of us is affected in t
he least, any more than in the reading of a Thermometer w
ith Fahrenheit on one side and Centigrade on the other.
255
You naturally object that this answer is little better t
han an evasion, that it automatically pushes the Gamut quest
ion outside the Charmed of-all-Truth Circle
. No, it doesn’t really; for if you were able to put up a
Projection of those two minds, there would be, firstly, s
ome sort of compensation elsewhere than in the musical se
ction; and secondly, some Truth of a yet higher order which i
s common to b
255
Not unaware am I that these conceptions are at
first exceedingly difficult to formulate clearly. I wouldn’t go s
o far as to say that one would have to be a Master of t
he Temple to understand them; but it is really very necessary t
o have grasped firmly the doctrine that “a thing is only t
rue insofar as it contains its contradiction in itself.” (A good w
ay to realize this is by keeping up a merry dance of p
aradoxes, such as infest Logic and Mathematics. The repeated b
utting of the head against a brick wall is bound in the long run t
o shake up the little grey cells [as Poirot might sa y], teach y
ou to distrust any train of argument, however a
pparently impeccable the syllogisms, and to seek ever more eagerly t
he dawn of that Neschamic consciousness where all these things
are clearly understood, although impossible to express in
rational language.
255
The prime function of intellect is differentiation; it d
eals with marks, with limits, with the relations of what is n
ot identical; in Neschamah all this work has been carried out s
o perfectly that the “rough working” has passed clean out o
f mind; just so, you say “I” as if it were an indivisible U
256
214
256
unconscious of the inconceivably intricate machinery o
f anatomical, physiological, psychological construction w
hich issues in this idea of “
256
We may then, with some confidence, reaffirm that o
ur certainties do assert our limitations; but this kind o
f limitation is not necessarily harmful, provided that we v
iew the situation in its proper perspective, that we u
nderstand that membership of the of-all-Truth class does not (as one i
s apt to think at first sight) deepen the gulfs which s
eparate mind from mind, but on the contrary put us in a position t
o ignore them. Our acts of “love under will,” which express o
ur devotion to Nuit, which multiply the fulfilments of o
ur possibilities, become continually more efficacious, and m
ore closely bound up with our Formula of Initiation; and w
e progressively become aware of deeper and vaster Images of
the of-all-Truth class, which reconcile, by including w
ithin themselves, all apparent antimonies.
It is certain without error that I ought to go to b
e